Nicolas Winding Refn isn’t being devious. In all the interviews he has given for this film, the successor to Drive, he’s frankly described himself as a pornographer: “I just approach making movies like a pornographer. I just put on the screen what I like, what turns me on.”

He’s also said he’s delighted to have repulsed many viewers as well as entranced some. Only God Forgives was booed at Cannes and has since been denounced by critics as “soulless and despicable”, the worst film ever. Refn’s response? “I know I fucked the audience and that is all I ever really set out to do.” Another of his recurrent proclamations is that “art is about penetration”.

Only God Forgives has a stark plot. Exiled gangster Julian (Ryan Gosling) runs a kick-boxing club in Bangkok as a cover for the family drugs business. His vile older brother Billy (Tom Burke) rapes and murders a teenage girl there and then is beaten to death by the girl’s father, under the direction of a mysteriously authoritative cop (Vithaya Pansringarm, a little-known middle-aged Thai actor of ordinary appearance but majestic presence), whose name (Chang) is never spoken in the film, for he is best understood to be an angel of vengeance, a supernatural being.

Julian’s mother Crystal, a bullying monster (Kristin Scott Thomas), flies in from the States to oversee the payback for the killing of her beloved firstborn that wussy Julian has failed to deliver. She hasn’t counted on having to combat Chang, though — and he is implacable, dispensing mutilation and death with a samurai sword he conceals behind his back. The film has an unwatchably cruel torture scene involving metal skewers and a variety of knives. After these acts of extreme violence, Chang is seen singing karaoke ballads to a room full of intently respectful uniformed policemen.

Only God Forgives, a French-Danish co-production made on a tiny budget, at a point when, given that he had Gosling in his pocket for a potential Drive 2, Refn surely would have had plenty of offers from Hollywood, is, to put it mildly, highly stylised.

Bangkok at night is made to look infernally coloured, soaked in red and neon. The soundtrack by Cliff Martinez is overpowering, full of drumming and organ chords. Yet the dialogue is sparse, Gosling speaking barely 20 lines in the whole film (“It’s not going to say what it is, you have to figure out what it is,” says Refn). You are never certain of just what level of reality you are watching — some scenes are perhaps just hallucinations. Chang and Julian move with weird slowness and are often still, simply standing and staring — the film progresses like a series of frames from a graphic novel, rather than a connected drama. It is oppressive, nightmarish, an effect enhanced by the camerawork, prowling through corridors in a way reminiscent of The Shining or the climax of Taxi Driver.

In Drive, Gosling’s silence was part of his strength. But Only God Forgives subverts all our expectations, making him the opposite of what audiences want him to be as an action hero (not only does he not get his shirt off, by the way, he dons a formal three-piece suit halfway through the film and then gets so battered he looks grotesque).

Like it or not, this is a study in weakness, submission, impotence, symbolic castration even. Julian’s apparent composure masks paralysis and guilt. Julian gazes repeatedly at his open hands and then makes a fist — but when he comes to fight he cannot land a blow. For he is in thrall to his contemptuous dragon mother. Scott Thomas is quite extraordinary as the horror-matriarch, eyes glittering, her appearance explicitly modelled on the mad Barbie that is Donatella Versace.

When Julian tells her that her beloved Billy raped and killed a 16-year-old girl, she says indifferently: “I am sure he had his reasons.” When Julian tries to introduce her to his prostitute girlfriend she mocks him in front of her, saying he was always jealous of his brother, who had a bigger penis — “Billy’s, oh it was enormous.” That’s far from the worst thing she says. Can Julian break his mother’s hold? Only in the most horrific way.

It’s not hard to see why Only God Forgives has been so disliked after Drive, which made so many men as well as women fall for Ryan Gosling. For here masculinity is not heroic but utterly abased. It’s a truly nasty fairytale from a director going his own way.